HN Explorer

Ask HN: Homeschooling Resources?

7 points by jashmenn ↗ HN
My son is 3 years old and I'm interested in homeschooling him.

Googling 'homeschool curriculum' and the like turns up a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. (I'm guessing there is a lot of money to be made for affiliates in homeschooling.)

I'd like to ask the HN community: What are your favorite resources are for homeschooling?

- How did you get started from "ground zero"?

- What blogs/websites do you read?

- What curriculum, if any, would you recommend?

- What books should I read?

For some background, both myself and my wife were homeschooled up until high-school. So we know what's involved from a student's side, but not from the parent's side.

10 comments

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gallamine
Where are you located? Your best bet might be to find local groups and ask them.

This group tends to be NC-centric, but it's worth asking them for recommendations: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/spice-line/

Fellow hacker, @ntalbott might give you some pointers. My son is 2 and we haven't started figuring things out yet, but we fully intend to HS.

AznHisoka
Startup idea: AirBnB for home schooling tutors.

You got experience, so you should do it :)

thejteam
Read "The Well-Trained Mind" by Susan Wise Bauer. It is written with only a hint of religion, so a secular homeschooler will still get a lot out of it. There are vast lists of resources in the book from kindergarten through high school. The book emphasizes a "classically based" curriculum. This means different things to different people.

My oldest is in Kindergarten and we are homeschooling her. You didn't mention your opinions on religion, but you will find that most of the complete curriculum are made by religious organizations. Although we are moderately religious, we use a completely secular curriculum, The Calvert School. See homeschool.calvertschool.org. We used them largely because they are an "umbrella" program approved by the stte of Maryland(where they are located and where I live.) We are happy with them so far. They are one of the more expensive programs out there but there is a lot of value in the materials they send.

If you are located in a state or school district that makes homeschooling difficult also consider joining the Home School Legal Defense Association. We have not had any problems(our county seems to be okay with homeschooling) but others in our state are not so lucky.

rgregory
This. We use this extensively for our nine year old and it's been fantastic.
kls
My wife and I have four kids all of them homeschooled. We made the decision when my oldest was in 3rd grade. Up until they are 5 don't worry too much about adopting a rigid formal homeschooling plan. Just use everyday situations to cover the basics, ABC's, 123, basic addition, subtraction etc. Use every "why" question from them as an opportunity to turn it into a simple science lesson. If you don't know the answer tell them lets go look it up. Just get them used to the process of how to seek answers.

After they are 5 you need to formalize it more, start to think about what it is you want you child to learn and start to form a schedule of subjects that they need to know. Understand that as they grow and become more independent that they need to be able to take over this schedule and do more and more things that they are interested in. For example if they like Chemistry let them opt to do more science in Chemistry over Astronomy.

As for curriculum, up until about 3rd grade it does not matter all that much, because you are dealing with reading writing and basic arithmetic. The last one being one one that curriculum is the most important for. We personally used Math-U-See and like it pretty well, but more and more for our older child we have been using http://www.khanacademy.org/ as a resource for her. One thing to beware of is that there are a lot of religious organizations in homeschooling, I have nothing wrong with religion per-say (I attend church and read the Bible) but I tend to not teach my children Science from text with religious affiliation, just as I don't teach them from text with an environment or activist affiliation. I share common beliefs with some of those groups, but for science I want just the facts with no agendas. Religion or environmental concerns are a separate study in my household. I say this because we have had to filter some of the science books provided to us from other homeschooling families.

thejteam
What are the advantages of Math-U-See? I have been looking for a new math curriculum. I think that the current one we use(Calvert School) is a little too basic.
kls
Math-U-See is a visual and object based math system, it's actually pretty revolutionary they use color coded blocks to represent math problems and the instructor video uses the same blocks, the student then has a set of blocks that they use to re-visualize the problem. They also start teaching Algebraic concepts early on. We are really happy with it for the K-8th education, as we start to enter high school level math we have been relying on Kahn's more and more. If you want more detail of why we did not choose other programs I can get that info from my wife. She narrowed them down and then I helped choose out of her narrowed selection. I don't know what her filters where for getting down to the smaller selection, I just know that Math-U-See stood out from the 3 we narrowed down to.
rgregory
My wife and I homeschool, and I've had her detail resources and whatnot here: http://homeschooly.com/blog/

Disclaimer: The links there are Amazon affiliate "enhanced" and I've experimented with other advertising on the site.

rgregory
We participate in a homeschool group (secular) which has a small number of families, as well as a co-operative (which folks teach various classes). We found both through Yahoo groups for our area (hamptonroads, va). I'll admit I was skeptical at first but now can't imagine not homeschooling.